1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a message processing apparatus, and more particularly, to a message processing apparatus which receives and displays messages sent from sending stations.
2. Description of the Related Art
The proliferation of personal computers has been promoting message communications over electronic media, including electronic mail exchange and net news reading. As people receive more and more messages every day, there will be an urgent need to efficiently deal with a large number of incoming messages, sorting out important ones from others.
To meet the above need, some conventional message processing apparatus handling e-mail and other electronic messages provide a message flag function which allows the sender to set a certain flag when sending what he/she thinks is an important message. At the receiving end, messages appearing on a display screen are marked with a special symbol (e.g., exclamation mark “!”) if their flags are set. Some other conventional apparatus offer e-mail filters which put the received messages into separate folders or make some of them invisible to the recipient, effectively screening them by sender names or some keywords contained in the messages. The mail recipients can set up such filters to meet their individual needs.
The above message screening functions, however, are limited in their capabilities. Particularly, they provide only simple visual distinctions between important messages and unimportant ones, which are so insufficient that the recipient sometimes fails to catch important notes or even discards them.
Another deficiency is non-uniformity in the behavior of receiving ends. In conventional message processing systems, the individual users have to set up their systems by themselves. Thus the receiving systems may react to the same message in different ways depending on their individual setups.